KB Trip

Ever wonder what your DNA has to do with your potential for increasing fitness? It's the age old question: is your fitness related more to nature, or nurture? I mean, we all know that guy who rolls out of bed in the morning, jogs to the bathroom and somehow gets fitter for the effort. The rest of us, however, are made to work for everything we've got. Are some people just more gifted? Apparently so.

In his book, The Sports Gene, author David Epstein examines the question of nature vs. nurture as it relates to athletic achievement. Here's a passage from The Talent of Trainability Chapter (pg. 80) :

Dr. Claude Bouchard, now of Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center and mastermind of the HERITAGE Family Study, already had an inkling of what the results would look like. In the 1980's Bouchard had put a group of thirty very sedentary subjects through identical training plans to see how much their aerobic capacities would increase. Endurance exercise has a profound impact on the human body. More blood is produced and it flows through new capillaries that sprout like roots into muscle. The heart and lungs strengthen, and energy-generating mitochondria proliferate in the cells.

Bouchard figured he would see some variation in VO2 max improvement between people, but "the range from 0 percent to 100 percent change, I did not expect," he says ...

At each of the four centers where volunteers were made to exercise ... the results of HERITAGE were astonishingly consistent. Despite the fact that every member of the study was on an identical exercise program, all four sites saw a vast and similar spectrum of aerobic capacity improvement, from about 15 percent of participants who showed little or now gain whatsoever after 5 months of training all the way up to the 15 percent of participants who improved dramatically, increasing the amount of oxygen their bodies could use by 50 percent or more.

Amazingly, despite the fact that not everyone in the study saw marked improvement in their fitness, ALL saw marked improvement in their HEALTH. Factors measured for heart disease, diabetes, cancer and etc. all showed signs of categorical improvements.

So what does it all mean? Easy. Exercise doesn't belong to the fittest among us. Neither do excuses for not exercising belong to those who see less improvement for their efforts.